


Echoes You Can Feel

by WednesdaysDaughter



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Wolf, Dimension-Hopping Rose, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22365712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WednesdaysDaughter/pseuds/WednesdaysDaughter
Summary: “Sure, let’s not mention to the woman who’s actually traveled space and time that the stars are dying at an alarming rate,” she mutters under her breath before shoving the conference doors open.A hush falls over the room and she takes in the faces of her coworkers, the people she’s come to count on while in the field to get her home. Their eyes are scared and Rose cannot deny the silent thrill threatening to overtake her calm voice as she addresses them.“We need the Doctor.”
Relationships: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	Echoes You Can Feel

**Author's Note:**

> I started this in April of last year (I think) and after reading some books about how to be a better writer I decided to come back - edit chapter one - and hopefully find the drive to crank out the other two chapters. Wish me luck.

Contrary to idle water cooler gossip, Rose Tyler did not live at the Torchwood facility.

A majority of her team assumed that when the guards secured the building for the night she snuck through abandoned corridors and hid away on the twelfth floor. Most of the building was already being used when she joined the paramilitary institution, but the construction crew was told to postpone development by Pete Tyler for reasons unknown. Cameras on that floor lost their feed, unable to record the hours Rose spent motionless in front of a bare wall.

No amount of surveillance could capture the way her trembling hands caress the colorless barrier; a sharp contrast against her multicolored flesh and bitten cuticles that bleed when she pressed her fingerprints into the drywall.

The Doctor’s not waiting on the other side anymore, but Rose has always been too stubborn for her own good. Jackie often finds an empty bed and her reproach nearly ends Rose’s midnight wanderings, but Pete watches Rose go through the motions with sympathy and unlocks the doors after Jackie locks them.

They take turns coming to collect Rose after the seventh night. She tries in vain to explain it to them in terms that might suddenly click in their brains. There’s no TARDIS to pry open, no truck strong enough to bridge the gap between her and the Doctor. Rose intermittently craves for space and time to converge once more in her veins, headaches be damned.

Some goddess she was.

“I thought you’d understand,” she chokes around an anger she didn’t think her body capable of as Mickey shakes his head – eyes a shade just shy of pity.

His arm against her back feels like a permanent brand and soon she stops the predictable habit of self-destruction long enough to lull her family into a false sense of security. She collapses in on herself like a dying star when no one is around and holds her head high like an impossible planet the first day she comes through the front door with sunlight on her heels.

She waited until the bruising along her knuckles had faded to a dusty yellow before letting Pete introduce her to the head of Development. It didn’t take long for Dr. Turing to see through her borrowed words, but was impressed by the unflinching determination in Rose’s eyes. She agrees to Pete’s terms and Rose enters Torchwood as a paid intern until she finishes school, much to the disdain of Dr. Turing’s assistant Milton.

“Errant daughter of the boss wants to play pretend as a scientist huh?”

All conversation ceases and before Dr. Turning can admonish Milton for his churlish behavior Rose pivots slowly. The look on her face seems to freeze time itself.

Crossing the floor, Rose can feel the weight of everyone’s gaze until she’s standing in front of Milton’s station. She catalogs the various bits and bobs of alien tech strewn about and feels her lips twitch when they land on an object he’d mistakenly classified.

Everyone holds their breath as she reaches down to remove the black tag ignoring Milton’s panicked exclamation.

“Don’t touch that!” he shouts and no one moves as her fingers dance over the azure device until a whirling sound fills the oppressive silence.

People brace for an explosion, falling to the floor with hands braced over their necks and faces. Milton ducks below his desk, but the absence of fiery destruction causes him to peer from behind his shelter just in time to witness an incredible display of an unknown nebula flash across the ceiling.

“The Gorlecks use these when they leave home,” Rose explains casually as if she hadn’t scared the life from an entire room.

“Interactive map used for travel, quite useful if we were capable of interstellar flight to be honest, though it’s notoriously difficult to use without precision orientation.”

She places the device back on the table and wraps a green tag along its base before strolling out of the room, people parting like the Red Sea in awe. Word gets around quickly about the incident and though Rose is quietly reprimanded for ignoring protocol, she is also given clearance to the Vault where she makes steady work of misidentified tech.

Between classes and training she has little time to sleep let alone sneak off to an unfurnished floor in a highly patrolled building. However she makes an effort to steal away during her lunch break and downs a protein shake while leaning against the wall. Her voice echoes in the barren space as she talks to ghosts about the latest discrepancies between worlds she’d taken to cataloging.

“The chips taste different here; I am not amused.”

As weeks melt into months the monitoring glitches become less frequent and the head of security always makes sure to wish Rose a ‘good night’ when she follows her coworkers out.

He watches her take the same path across the street and through an alley he knows leads to a local pub. He suspects the sunglasses she wears in the morning have less to do a hangover and more to do with heartache. Nevertheless her smile parts the London clouds when his greeting pulls her from what he assumes are troubled thoughts.

“It’s a beautiful day Miss Tyler.”

Amber eyes flash in the beams of sun pouring through spotless windows as Rose thinks about the promising data Jake emailed her last night. Unbidden a smile pulls her pink lips taunt and she ignores the wide eyes of her coworkers as she replies cheerfully.

“I couldn’t agree more Mitch.”

= = = = = = = = = =

The enigmatic existence of an heir makes for busy days in the life of London’s journalists.

Thankfully Rose was used to outrunning creatures who wanted to either capture or kill her, so dodging senseless paparazzi was a walk in the park. It became a game she played between missions after she’s collected her A Levels and passed every qualification imaginable to enter the field. Jake and Mickey are often caught in the crossfire and every week there’s a new tabloid issued debating which of them was lucky enough to snag the ‘mysterious heiress’ amorous attention’.

There’s a pool at Torchwood too, but no one with half a brain thinks about risking their money when they see the look in Rose’s eye as she tells them stories about the Doctor.

“It’s a love story,” Yvonne sighs over her chocolate croissant after Rose regales them with a trip back to war-torn London. She unconsciously sways side to side much to her coworker’s amusement as Glen Miller transports her to another time. Rose becomes a different person when she tells her stories: Her laugh reverberates through the endless line of cubicles and people’s heads turn when they see her cheeky grin.

Someone takes it upon themselves to dig around in hopes of lining up her experiences with an alternate world and Mickey is the one who watches the fallout when Rose learns there is no Captain Jack Harkness running around – no one offered him a lift.

After that Rose takes online classes dedicated to history, both well-known and obscure. She uses her free time to speak to local historians and dig through ashen records to find the smallest hint of a time-traveling race too curious to leave well enough alone. No faces stand out; no stories come across as incredible and impossible in the same breath where a crisis is adverted and everybody lives. The theory that Time Lords exist solely in her universe causes her to giggle hysterically in the bathroom stalls until a janitor puts an ‘out of order’ sign on the door.

Not one to be deterred, Rose soldiers on and finds unexpected joy in a wiggly bundle weighing half a stone who stares at her like she hung the moon in the sky.

Shoved in some forgotten corner of her mind is Rose’s lukewarm desire to have children. There existed dreams before she met the Doctor of what she and Mickey’s kids would look like which were replaced quite suddenly by vivid daydreams of a little girl. Her warm brown hair flashing past a console with a manic smile wide enough to hold all the secrets in the universe

Her eyes would’ve been blue.

It’s not like being exposed to an infant suddenly brought her deep-seeded parental desires to the forefront, but when Tony reached out to touch her face and giggled when Rose nuzzled his tummy something bittersweet ached behind her ribcage.

It made her miss the Doctor more – made her miss those silly fantasies where she was able to give him something back for all that was taken away. She wasn’t lying when she told him over pancakes one day that she had no designs on settling down and raising 2.5 kids with a picket fence: That life was no longer an option for her and Rose didn’t miss the possibly either, much to her mother’s chagrin.

“I never wanna stop traveling,” she grinned, licking the syrup off her lips and watching delighted when he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

“You say that now.”

A wistful glaze settled in the depths of his fathomless stare, but Rose refused to take the bait.

“You sound like my Mum,” she teased and just like that it was gone.

“Oi!” he exclaimed not even bothering to hide how offended he felt.

Her mischievous laugh eventually soothed the offense and they were off on another adventure –conversation left with the dishes he promised to do later.

Tony flourishes under her doting attention and Jackie never wants for a babysitter unless Rose is away on assignment. She’s there for his first steps and the first time Tony is able to utter the name ‘osie, she finds herself watching the video in an old military bunker.

Two months after that Rose uncovers a Slitheen plot that it nearly sends her five steps back to that girl clinging to her mother on a beach after a hologram broke her heart. Bit by bit something starts to harden at the very core of her until Rose is able to come across déjà vu without blinking twice.

The first time she verbally refers to the mansion as home causes Mickey and Jake to trip over themselves and Rose just rolls her eyes. Doing so doesn’t feel like defeat, more like a necessary concession made in an effort to survive. It doesn’t means she’s given up on the Doctor just as triage on a battlefield does not mean surrender – no matter the number of casualties. She works through the one year anniversary and the only sign of her unspoken ache goes unnoticed by her colleagues, but not Lex the bartender who knows her order by heart. Her table is empty and the smoke floats over the neon signs drawing attention to aging wood as the shots lined up are downed silently and without hesitation.

When she closes her eyes she can picture Jack’s gleeful grin in her bedroom as they pass a bottle of vodka back and forth. Phantom warmth unfurls her tense limbs and no one pays attention to the wistful blonde in the back toasting to memories too painful to relive, but too important to forget.

= = = = = = = = =

Her dreams are golden whirls of dust, dancing just out of reach as she is pulled into the waking world by an ill-timed phone call.

Nearly biting Mickey’s head off, she’s down the stairs and out the door without so much as a ‘hello’ to an irate Jackie. Pete’s waiting in the car out front and Rose has barely clicked her seat-belt into place before he’s speeding down the drive.

“Doesn’t anyone respect the unspoken rule of Sunday sleep-in’s anymore?” she grouses after skimming over an inadequate Intel report.

“Apparently they didn’t get the memo.”

“Bloody Americans.”

She’s debriefed on the plane and while she’s not the first person to suggest sabotage, she is the first one to realize it’s not an alien attack.

“Our base in India, which is known to house untold gigabytes of data pertaining to extraterrestrial life, just so happens to experience an electrical surge strong enough to fry every computer within a select 50 mile radius and no one suspects foul play?”

Pete leans forward in his seat, accepting a cuppa from Mickey who’d snagged some additional data from home base and almost missed the flight.

“Why would one our guys do such a thing?”

“I never said it was one of ours.”

Mickey grimaces, “That’s a cheerful thought babe thanks for that.”

Pete turns her suspicions around his brain until they land and thirty-two hours later when she’s proven correct he’s too busy putting pressure on her bleeding abdomen to care about bullshit politics.

They nearly miss Tony’s first birthday before staging a breakout from the local hospital. A mole from a competing organization originating in Poland infiltrated the American branch with credentials so hastily put together an untrained monkey could’ve spot the forgery. The delicate balance of networked intelligence is thrown into disarray because somebody knew somebody who was friends with somebody who wouldn’t know ‘classified information’ if it danced naked in front of them singing “Yankee Doodle”.

The head of the Los Angeles branch bears the weight of Rose’s ire and overnight she becomes an office legend across the pond though not the way she was expecting. Yelling at someone always made her mother feel better and the older she got Rose realized the same could be said of her. Fear drove her insubordination to new heights, but she refused to be cowed by rank.

She could’ve died and the Doctor never would’ve known.

It’s only by the grace of Pete’s silver tongue that sees her back home safely, job intact, with enough vacation pay to make the riot act she read seem like a fever dream.

She travels.

Barcelona, the city not the planet, keeps her busy while she takes in every nook and cranny with vibrant eyes. She plays tourist so well by the time she leaves Rose feels as if she knows the city like the back of her hand. The itch beneath her skin scratched, she snakes her way across Europe until she finds herself walking the halls of the Palace of Versailles. The tour continues ahead and she takes in the various paintings of men and women who’ve long come and gone. It feels a little bit like time travel; enough for her to taste metal on her tongue when she’s pealed skin from her bottom lip without realizing.

Rose does not linger in the hall dedicated to the women who ruled behind the throne; her eyes catching those of a ghost who existed in both past and future. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together as he broke through a window on a white horse; every bit the knight she knew him to be back when he wore leather. He’d called himself a coward once though Rose shook her head against the notion at the time.

Standing on that beach, arm raised in hopes of feeling his cool flesh against her palm, Rose realized that his self-preservation had been in vain. Her lungs still burned beneath the weight of her muffled sobs and her heart beat a broken, bruising, rhythm against her chest that felt it was going to crumble beneath her grief.

She would never know if those fleeting possibilities would’ve lessened the throb of heartbreak, but those timelines didn’t matter anymore.

Rose drinks wine and watches the sunset on the balcony.

The ambient clamor drifts up from the streets and teleports her to a bustling market on a planet two galaxies away. There was so much to see, she nearly gave herself whiplash trying to take it all in. His laugh follows her from stall to stall until the sun bounces off a stack of bracelets, catching her attention like the vendor intended.

The melody of them clanking against one another as she swings her arms in abandon follows them back to the TARDIS and he can’t take his eyes off her smile. The weight of his stare fits like her favorite pair of jeans and Rose is certain there was alcohol of some sort in that popsicle he bought her. Everything that is not his freckled face blends into an indistinguishable blur around her, the hand on her lower back setting fire to her humming blood.

She always wants to kiss him, but this is the first time she knows with unquestionable certainty that he wants the same.

Time seems to holds its breath when Rose turns into the Doctor’s body – her back pressed against the doors she knows won’t open because she isn’t the only one who’s been waiting for this moment. If possible, his eyes darken and her name passes his parted lips on a sigh so gentle its caress across her own lips nearly makes her close her eyes.

A loud crash pulls her violently from the memory, a rueful chuckle chasing the quick jolt of adrenaline flooding her system.

“Seems like I’m never gonna get that kiss,” she muses to no one and pours herself another drink.

A local urchin took advantage of their lowered guard and snagged the sonic out of the Doctor’s pocket, thinking it’d be worth enough to feed their siblings. Rose’s disappointment had melted the second her eyes landed on the small child and she spent the next hour buying enough food to keep them comfortable in the upcoming weeks. The youngest gives her an iridescent flower in return and she bends down to engulf them all in a big hug, her eyes moist at their overwhelming gratitude.

“Rose Tyler,” the Doctor beamed when they finally made it back to the TARDIS and the way his voice molded itself around her name was worth every unbridged inch between their lips.

= = = = = = = = = =

A year comes and goes.

While working for Torchwood could never be called episodic, there are days when Rose wants to crawl out of her skin: Teeth on edge and goosebumps constantly racing up her arms – she morphs into the human embodiment of flight, not fight. Sleep eludes her and empty London streets become her playground as she runs until her body quits and falls into oblivious out of necessity.

Eventually she’s granted clearance she’d never heard of until her ID is being re-chipped. With it comes and office and paperwork she can’t leave off until the next day. Answering directly to Pete, Rose is sure to leave nothing out during meetings or at the dinner table. Jackie goes as far as forbidding shop talk.

‘ _There’s something in the air_.’

Mickey keeps a close eye on her after their latest act of death-defying heroics for an ignorant populace puts her out of commission for a month. He brings her reports to foil the inevitable cabin fever and she waves his concern out the open window.

Jackie picks up on Rose’s mood and utilizes Tony in hopes of chasing away the shadows that have crept in her daughter’s eyes. Rose dutifully plays the role of ‘big sister’ while her ankle heals and does her best to let Jackie mother her. Before she can go completely mental, Pete clears her for light duty and she splits the time between her office and the Development Lab.

She walks Mickey and Jake through first contact with a clan of BorbaNoes whose ship crashed on the shores of the Shetland Islands. They are wary at first, more so after their translator’s glitch and Jake’s flippant tone causes them to raise their fins in distress. However Rose avoids an intergalactic incident after being patched through and speaking directly to the head of the clan – reminiscing fondly of her visit to their home world with the Doctor.

Distress melts into curiosity and Mickey proudly brags to anyone who’ll listen later that there was no creature she couldn’t charm.

“Well,” he hesitates when his eyes take in the death grip she has on the edge of her desk, “maybe not Daleks.”

“Or Cybermen,” she adds with a brittle smile.

_‘Something coming.’_

Rose turns twenty-two and gets a call that changes everything.

She doesn’t have to see the look on Mickey’s face to know he’s rolling his eyes when she confesses her frustration. Deep down she knows the impracticality of it all. The odds against her looking up at the exact moment a start went out were astronomical at best, incalculable at worst.

However the knowledge that this phenomenon had been looked into months prior to her being told made Rose a little tetchy. 

“Sure, let’s not mention to the woman who’s actually traveled space _and_ time that the stars are dying at an alarming rate,” she mutters under her breath before shoving the conference doors open.

A hush falls over the room and she takes in the faces of her coworkers, the people she’s come to count on while in the field to get her home. Their eyes are scared and Rose cannot deny the silent thrill threatening to overtake her calm voice as she addresses them. A wrinkled set of blueprints burns a hole in her jacket along with the latest in a long line of printed reports; data she can’t let distract her from the fact disaster is certainly a breath away.

Cracks that weren’t there before are slowly spreading – creating rifts that pull at her like the moon’s pull on the sea. They call to her in siren’s song so beautiful and deadly that Rose has no choice but to finally lay her cards on the table.

“We can’t do this alone,” she locks eyes with Mickey across the room and his nod is all she needs to say what’s been playing on repeat in her mind since she beat her hands blue against the wall on the twelfth floor, “We need the Doctor.” 

_‘A storm’s approaching.’_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm such a fan of the Rose Tyler Chronicles that Big Finish did last year so look forward to some of those tidbits in the next chapter!


End file.
